If ecocriticism is a literary criticism that focuses on textual interpretation, ecocomposition is the flip side of the same coin, concentrating on textual production and the environments that affect and are affected by the production of discourse. “[E]composition is about relationships; it is about the constitutive existence of writing and environment; it is about physical environment and constructed environment; it is about the production of written discourse and the relationship of that discourse to the places it encounters” (Weisser and Dobrin 2). This study is important because, as R.C. Lewontin et. al. argue, "All organisms—but especially human being[s]—are not simply the results but are also the causes of their own environments” (qtd. in Weisser and Dobrin 17).
Derek Owens in "Sustainable Composition" suggests that “Teachers who design their courses in response to our threatened local environments are doing something that needs to spill over into the rest of the curriculum. Whether we teach first-year writing courses, design writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives, or run writing centers, compositionists need to acknowledge their fundamental roles in creating sustainable curriculum that moves continually toward environmental stability and community revitalization.” Owens provides practical examples of writing projects he has used to foster environmental thought and awareness.
Another critique born out of ecocomposition concerns the possible alienating nature of some important environmental writing. Killingsworth and Krajicek explain: “while the political alienation of a Muir or a Thoreau has represented a powerfully productive critical force in American culture at large, close identification with the form of environmentalism that depends upon the conceptual triad of ecology, alienation, and literacy, may alienate…a large percentage of any contemporary class of student, and may thereby stand in the way of effective teaching. Moreover, the students who resist this perspective may well have something to teach us about the rhetorical shelf life of the old environmentalism with its woodsiness and wordiness.” They continue to explore this concept by defining a "Triple Persona" in much eco-writing:
In Julie Drew's "Politics of Place", she argues that temporal concerns have consistently trumped spatial ones in the academy. She quotes W.J. Soja who states that critical social theory is “still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparable geographical imagination.” The consequences of such a myopic view are evident to Drew: “The traditional and consequential submergence of the spatial within the temporal for critical social theory, then, effectively helps to veil institutional power within politicized spaces such as classrooms. Such an understanding is important for composition studies because critical social theory—the “search for practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo”—is an indispensible component of radical pedagogical theory and practice.”
Drew's solution is a paradigm shift in the way teachers view themselves, their students, and the productions of composition classrooms. She wishes the classroom to be viewed as a "contact zone" between people operating in numerous discourses, "travelers" so to speak, co-producing a new discourse. “Students pass through, and only briefly pause within, classrooms; they dwell within and visit various other locations, locations whose politics and discourse conventions both construct and identify them. By reimagining students as travelers we may construct a politics of place that is more likely to include students in the academic work of composition, and less likely to continue to identify and manage students as discursive novices.”
Anis Bawarshi, in "The Ecology of Genre" seeks to establish the hows and whys of genres as rhetorical ecosystems. Using the example of a doctor's office and stating that certain expectations are constructed and certain modes of acceptable human behavior are the result of social ideas about what is "natural", Bawarshi compellingly argues that we do what we do, in the Dr's office and elsewhere, as a result of the genre in which we perceive ourselves to be participating.
Finally, Christian Weisser notes that the systems awareness of ecology may be brought to bear on the self, facilitating the development of an eco-identity. That is, people may begin to understand who they are in relation to where they are and have been, thereby familiarizing and stimulating compassion for the places that make us who we are. (Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity)
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